Salesforce CRM Functions

Packt Publishing

Salesforce CRM is a web-based Customer Relationship Management Service designed to transform your marketing and sales. With this complete guide to implementing the service, administrators of all levels can easily acquire deep knowledge of the platform.

Functional overview of Salesforce CRM

The Salesforce CRM functions are related to each other and, as mentioned previously, have cross-over areas which can be represented as shown in the following diagram:

Marketing administration

Marketing administration is available in Salesforce CRM under the application suite known as the Marketing Cloud.

The core functionality enables organizations to manage marketing campaigns from initiation to lead development in conjunction with the sales team. The features in the marketing application can help measure the effectiveness of each campaign by analyzing the leads and opportunities generated as a result of specific marketing activities.

Salesforce automation

Salesforce automation is the core feature set within Salesforce CRM and is used to manage the sales process and activities. It enables salespeople to automate manual and repetitive tasks and provides them with information related to existing and prospective customers. In Salesforce CRM, Salesforce automation is known as the Sales Cloud, and helps the sales people manage sales activities, leads and contact records, opportunities, quotes, and forecasts.

Customer service and support automation

Customer service and support automation within Salesforce CRM is known as the Service Cloud, and allows support teams to automate and manage the requests for service and support by existing customers. Using the Service Cloud features, organizations can handle customer requests, such as the return of faulty goods or repairs, complaints, or provide advice about products and services.

Associated with the functional areas, described previously, are features and mechanisms to help users and customers collaborate and share information known as enterprise social networking.

Enterprise social networking

Enterprise social network capabilities within Salesforce CRM enable organizations to connect with people and securely share business information in real time. Social networking within an enterprise serves to connect both employees and customers and enables business collaboration. In Salesforce CRM, the enterprise social network suite is known as Salesforce Chatter.

Salesforce CRM record life cycle

The capabilities of Salesforce CRM provides for the processing of campaigns through to customer acquisition and beyond as shown in the following diagram:

At the start of the process, it is the responsibility of the marketing team to develop suitable campaigns in order to generate leads. Campaign management is carried out using the Marketing Administration tools and has links to the lead and also any opportunities that have been influenced by the campaign.

When validated, leads are converted to accounts, contacts, and opportunities. This can be the responsibility of either the marketing or sales teams and requires a suitable sales process to have been agreed upon. In Salesforce CRM, an account is the company or organization and a contact is an individual associated with an account.

Opportunities can either be generated from lead conversion or may be entered directly by the sales team. As described earlier in this article, the structure of Salesforce requires account ownership to be established which sees inherited ownership of the opportunity. Account ownership is usually the responsibility of the sales team.

Opportunities are worked through a sales process using sales stages where the stage is advanced to the point where they are set as won/closed and become sales. Opportunity information should be logged in the organization's financial system.

Upon financial completion and acceptance of the deal (and perhaps delivery of the goods or service), the post-customer acquisition process is then enabled where the account and contact can be recognized as a customer. Here the customer relationships concerning incidents and requests are managed by escalating cases within the customer services and support automation suite.

Marketing administration

Marketing administration in Salesforce CRM provides closed-loop marketing automation from within the marketing app which can be accessed from the App Menu at the top-right corner of the Salesforce CRM screen.

Marketing administration enables integrated marketing functions such as campaign management, lead management, reporting and analysis, response tracking, and campaign effectiveness and it allows users from various departments to centrally access marketing activity.

By default, the marketing administration features provide some level of read-only access to all users. However, to create, edit, and delete campaigns and carry out advanced campaign and lead management functions, users must have the Marketing User License set on their user record as shown next:

The following key features are available within Salesforce CRM marketing administration:

Campaign management

Lead management

Campaign management

With targeted marketing campaigns, companies can build market awareness, generate leads, and learn from their campaign results to fine-tune offers to various customer segments.

The campaign management feature in Salesforce CRM allows your users to manage and track outbound marketing activities. These can be direct mail, roadshow, online or print advertising, e-mail, or other types of marketing initiative.

Some CRM systems have sales and marketing features separated, requiring marketing and sales users to log on to two separate modules; however, with Salesforce CRM, a dedicated Campaign tab is provided to enable marketing and sales users to work together within a single system.

Within the Campaign tab, the marketing team can access sales information for their campaigns and the sales team can have visibility into the marketing activities that affect their accounts, contacts, and leads. Campaigns can also be organized into hierarchies for flexible analysis of related marketing initiatives.

By integrating the marketing and sales effort for campaign and lead management activities, far greater collaboration can be achieved.

Essential success criteria for campaigns can be captured and used to further develop the definition of marketing targets. This enables marketing departments to become more accountable and to better demonstrate their marketing ROI (return on investment).

The steps to consider when managing and working with campaigns in Salesforce CRM are:

Campaign planning

Campaign setup

Campaign creation

Campaign execution

Campaign responses

Campaign effectiveness

Campaign planning

Before starting to build and run campaigns, it is useful to have an overall plan of the goals and objectives of the campaign, such as the core processes and the type of campaign, such as mass marketing e-mails, hosting a conference, sending direct mail, and so on.

The targets for the campaign need to also be identified and whether they should be existing customers, existing leads, or new leads. With existing leads you can use lead scoring and lead status to facilitate customer segmentation. For example, a series of archived status definitions could be used, such as No Interest, Future Interest, Nurture, and so on.

Consider how you need to analyze and report on campaigns.

It is worth considering this at an early stage and look to create custom campaign fields. You can customize campaigns so that you can improve the targeting and customer segmentation and help to compare and analyze which types of campaigns are the most effective for your sales and marketing teams.

Your marketing team may also want to target new leads through the use of third-party lists. These third-party lists of suspects, prospects, or leads can be flagged in Salesforce with a specific indicator. By flagging with a different record type, or assigning to a different queue, these lead records can be kept apart from existing prospects so that any pre-qualification or de-duplicating can be done before they are available for use in campaigns.

Campaign setup

When setting up campaign management, you should identify who should have access to campaigns.

To create, edit, and delete campaigns and configure advanced campaign setup, users must have the Marketing User license checked on their user record.

By default, all users have read access to campaigns, but to create, edit, or delete campaigns, users must have the Create permission on their profile as shown:

When starting new types of campaigns, your marketing and sales teams should collaborate to agree on the customer information that is to be captured. Here you can use the standard fields for both the Campaign and Campaign Member objects or create new custom fields as appropriate.

Standard campaign fields

The following key standard fields are available on the Campaign object:

Field

Type

Description

Campaign Name

Text

This is the name of the marketing campaign. A relevant name should be chosen that is useful for both the marketing and sales teams. For example, Webinar Widgets EMEA FY12Q1.

Type

Picklist

This field is used for the type of campaign. Salesforce provides the following standard list: Conference, Webinar, Trade Show, Public Relations, Partners, Referral Program, Advertisement, Banner Ads, Direct Mail, E-mail, Telemarketing,and Other.

Status

Picklist

This field is used for the current status of a campaign. Salesforce provides the following standard list: Planned, In Progress, Completed, and Aborted.

Start Date

Date

This field is used for the date when a campaign starts.

End Date

Date

This field is used for the date when a campaign ends.

Expected Revenue

Currency

This field is used to set the amount of revenue the campaign will generate.

Budgeted Cost

Currency

This field is used to set the amount of money that has been budgeted for the running of the campaign.

Actual Cost

Currency

This field is used to set the amount of money that the campaign actually cost to run. This field must be recorded to calculate ROI.

Note: The ROI is calculated as the net gain using the following expression: ((Total Value Won Opportunities - Actual Cost) / Actual Cost)) * 100.

Expected Response (%)

Percentage

This field is used to set the expected response rate for the campaign.

Num Sent

Number

This field is used to set the quantity of individuals targeted in the campaign. For example, if a webinar campaign involved sending out invites to 25,000 people, then 25000 would be entered as the number sent.

Active

Checkbox

This field is used to set the campaign to either active or not active.

Note: If the campaign is not active, it will not appear in reports or campaign selection picklists (found on lead, contact, opportunity edit pages, and related lists).

Description

Text (long-text area)

This field allows up to 32,000 characters to be entered to add detailed information for the campaign.

Total Leads

Number

This field is the sum of all leads linked to this campaign.

Total Contacts

Number

This field is the sum of all contacts linked to this campaign.

Converted Leads

Number

This field is the sum of all leads linked to this campaign that have been converted.

Total Responses

Number

This field is the sum of all Campaign Members which are linked to this campaign and have their member status set to Responded.

Total Value Opportunities

Currency

This field is the total amount of all opportunities linked to this campaign.

Total Value Won Opportunities

Currency

This field is the total amount of all Closed/Won opportunities linked to this campaign

The complete set of fields is shown next where the picklist values can be adapted to suit your organization. They are accessed by following the path Your Name | Setup | (App Setup) | Customize | Campaigns | Fields:

Standard campaign member fields

The following key standard fields are available on the Campaign Member object:

Field

Type

Description

Campaign

Lookup (Campaign)

This field is the campaign name. Set using a link to the campaign record.

Contact

Lookup (Contact)

This field is the contact name. Set using a link to the contact record.

Note: Either a Contact is set or Lead is set (not both).

Lead

Lookup (Lead)

This field is the lead name. Set using a link to the lead record.

Note: Either a Contact is set or Lead is set (not both).

Status

Picklist

This is the status of the Campaign Member as part of the linked campaign. Salesforce provides the following standard values: Planned, Sent, Received,and Responded.

Every campaign has a specific outcome which can be captured on the member status and response fields. With well-defined member status and response values, reporting can be carried out much easier.

The complete set of fields is shown next where the picklist values can be adapted to suit your organization. They are accessed by following the path Your Name | Setup | (App Setup) | Customize | Campaigns | Campaign Members | Fields:

Both your marketing and sales teams should also help define and agree on any required custom fields or picklist values; for example, segmentation definitions, status, and responses.

Campaign creation

To create campaigns, users must have the Marketing User checkbox selected in their user record and have the Create permission on campaigns in their profile as shown previously.

To create a campaign, follow the steps:

Click on the Campaigns tab to view the campaign's home page or select Campaign from the Create New drop-down list in the sidebar.

Enter values for the fields that apply to the campaign as shown in the following screenshot:

Now click on Save, or click on Save & New to save the campaign, and then add another.

Member status values

New campaigns have two default member status values: Sent and Responded. These are populated from the Campaign Member Status picklist that we looked at earlier.

Non-system administrator users can, however, overwrite the status values (for the specific campaign record only) from within the campaign detail page by clicking on the Advanced Setup button as shown in the following screenshot:

Here, your users can edit or replace them, or create new ones as necessary:

Target lists

Target lists is a marketing term used to describe the individuals or types of people that are to be included as part of the marketing campaign.

In some situations, such as with an online advertising campaign, people are not specifically set up as individual targets. Here the campaign would usually be set up in Salesforce as one without members.

If your campaign is targeting individuals, it is important to create a target list that has been segmented according to criteria that will result in the highest quality returns.

Targeting existing leads or contacts

To target existing leads or contacts, you can use the following methods in Salesforce CRM:

Method

Description

Use the Campaign Detail page

Click on the Manage Members button to add multiple campaign members

Create Lead or Contact reports

Click on the Add to Campaign button to add multiple campaign members

Use Lead or Contact List views

Click on the Add to Campaign button to add multiple campaign members

Use the Lead or Contact Detail pages

Click on the Add to Campaign button to add a single campaign member

Using the campaign detail page

To add multiple campaign members from the Campaign Detail page, users should select the Manage Members button as shown in the following screenshot:

You can add existing contacts or leads by selecting Add Members – Search from the Manage Members drop-down button on a Campaign Detail page.

Creating lead or contact reports

To add multiple campaign members from either lead or contact reports, carry out the following:

Create a custom lead or contact report.

In the Select Criteria step, enter up to three criteria to segment the report data.

For example, to target all CFOs at Electronics or Energy companies with annual revenue greater than 10 million, you would set the following:

Title equals CFO

Industry equals Technology, Telecommunications(using a comma to indicate an OR Boolean result)

Annual Revenue greater than 10,000,000

Now you can run the report and use the Add to Campaign button as shown in the following screenshot:

Using lead or contact list views

From within a lead or contact list view, you can click on the Add to Campaign button to add multiple campaign members as shown in the following screenshot:

Using the lead or contact detail pages

You can use the Add to Campaign button within the Lead Detail and Contact Detail pages to add that record as an individual campaign member as shown in the following screenshot:

Targeting new leads or prospects

When using externally purchased lists of new prospects within Salesforce, it is advisable to flag the records with a specific third-party designation (say by record type, or custom picklist value). These records can then be pre-qualified before adding to any campaign or sales activity. Particularly important is the de-duplication of any new leads against existing records in your Salesforce database to determine which are existing customers or leads.

Salesforce does not recommend mass importing rented or purchased lists of prospects into Salesforce as these lists are usually controlled by the list vendor and may have restriction or limited use policies. Here you should simply make use of the list of names as your target list and only after the prospect has responded to your campaign should you import the lead record.

Campaign execution

Although campaign execution activities occur outside the Salesforce CRM application during the execution of either an offline or an online campaign, there are some features of the campaign activity that can be aided using the export facilities within Salesforce.

Users can use Salesforce to generate lists of accounts and individuals for mailing houses or e-mailing specialist partners to send out the mass marketing e-mails used in both online and offline events (such as trade shows, advertisements, direct mail, and so on).

There are various options available for integrating Salesforce with other solutions, including provision for mass e-mailing. Integration solutions are covered later in this article where sources include the AppExchange directory (a Salesforce.com sponsored market place for accredited products and services).

Salesforce can be used to deliver some mass e-mail, but the application is not intended for large volume mass e-mail marketing and there are limits to the quantity of e-mails that can be sent.

For each Salesforce application, a total of 1,000 e-mails can be sent per day to external e-mail addresses. Using the Enterprise Edition, the maximum number of external addresses (unique or non-unique) you can include in a mass e-mail is 500 and for the Unlimited Edition, the limit is 1000.

You can build an integrated web form to automatically capture individuals as leads in Salesforce.

Campaign responses

After the campaign has been executed, your company will want to track the responses which can include:

Website response using a form on your website where you can set up a Web-to-Lead form to create a target page with a response form. All responses appear in Salesforce as leads but can be linked to the campaign.

Mass update or offline response using the campaign member import wizards to import a list of leads or contacts and their responses. Users need the Marketing User profile or the Import Leads permission to use these wizards.

Manual response, for example, when prospects and customers respond by phone or e-mail, users can manually record these responses on the Campaign History related list on the lead or Contact Detail page:

Campaign influence

To ensure existing opportunities are included in the results for the campaign, you can add the campaign to the Campaign Influence related list on the opportunity as shown next.

By setting the Primary Campaign Source flag (a checkbox on the Campaign Influence record), the opportunity amount is included in the campaign statistics and reports:

Campaign effectiveness

Campaign effectiveness can be analyzed using either the statistics on the campaign record or by running campaign reports.

Campaign statistics

The summary fields on the Campaign Detail page as shown next allows various statistics to be seen, such as the total number of responses, the amount of business generated from the campaign, and so on:

The campaign statistics are automatically recalculated every time a campaign is saved. When a lead gets converted to an opportunity, the campaign that was most recently associated to the lead will automatically pass over to the opportunity.

Campaign reports

Reports can be accessed from the Reports tab by selecting the Campaign Reports folder as shown in the following screenshot:

As an example, the Campaign ROI Analysis Report shows performance metrics and gives you a figure for the return on investment for the campaign as shown in the following screenshot:

Lead management

Managing prospective customers appropriately often raises issues within companies. The status and quality of prospect data can cause obstacles when trying to automate the processing through the sales process. Prospect data often comes from various sources which, if not carefully controlled, can make them difficult to accurately process.

Without a central system and agreed approach, there can be conflicts between the marketing team, who are often unable to trace what is happening to the prospects after distributing them to sales, and the sales team who are unable to verify the quality of the data. Salesforce CRM helps bridge any gap between sales and marketing, and by using lead management mechanisms offers a way to improve the management and automation of the flow from potential customers to a closed sales deal.

Leads are prospects or potential opportunities and are accessed in Salesforce CRM from the Leads tab. They are sources of potential deals that usually need more qualification and may be visitors to your website who requested more information, respondents to marketing campaigns as described previously in managing campaigns, trade show visitors, and so on. Leads are stored and managed separately to account, contact, and opportunity records.

Standard lead fields

The following key standard fields are available on the Lead object:

Field

Type

Description

Lead Owner

Lookup (to lead or queue)

This field is the user or queue who owns the lead. A lead can be owned by a person or stored in a queue. Here, you can allow specified users to accept (and return) leads from a queue. This is covered in more detail later in this section.

Last Name

Text

This field is the last name and is a required field. The last name is copied over to the Last Name field on a contact record during the lead conversion process.

Company

Text

This field is the company name and is a required field. The company name is copied over to the company name on an account record during the lead conversion process.

Lead Status

Picklist

This field is the status and is a required field. Salesforce provides the following standard values: Open - Not Contacted, Working - Contacted, Closed - Converted, and Closed - Not Converted.

Lead Status is an important field used in the lead process settings as described later in this section.

Lead Source

Picklist

This field is used to set the source from which the lead appeared. Salesforce provides the following standard values: Web, Phone Inquiry, Partner Referral, Purchased List, and Other.

The complete set of fields is shown next where the picklist values can be adapted to suit your organization. They are accessed by following the path Your Name | Setup | (App Setup) | Customize | Leads | Fields:

Lead business process

Creating a business process within the lead management function involves agreeing on and implementing the steps and field values that are to be recorded by the sales and marketing teams during the lead life cycle.

The lead processes are accessed by following the path Your Name | Setup | (App Setup) | Leads | Lead Processes where processes can be created or edited as shown in the following screenshot:

You can now assign the status values for the lead as shown in the following screenshot:

Finally, by associating the lead business process with one or more record types, this will make it available to your users (based on their profile).

Summary

In this article, we looked at the functional areas within Salesforce CRM where we described the process from campaign to customer and beyond.

Within the functional areas, there are various touch points where the business teams concerned with marketing, sales, and customer service have to agree on roles and responsibilities for aspects of the business processes. Salesforce has developed Salesforce Chatter, a collaboration application that helps in this respect by connecting people and sharing business information.

We looked at how automation can improve the experience for campaign and lead management when producing targets at the start of a campaign, and how the ROI can be measured with statistics and reports at the end.

We also saw how leads can be converted to generate the accounts, contacts, and opportunity records which would be processed through the sales cycle and become the closed opportunity and customer entities.

We described the ways in which Salesforce can be used to support these customers by the customer service and support teams, and the case management features that are associated with the account and contact information to solve problems and answer queries.

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